Into A Paris Quartier

by Diane Johnson

  Of course, like everything, the apartment cost more than we had planned to spend or thought we could, but I hoped that love would find a way, and luckily, when John was brought round to see it, he fell in love, too. Despite the primitive bathroom with its pull-chain toilet, and the phone extensions strung on overhead wires, bob-and-spool wiring, and other vestiges of resistance to the modern world, we began to have long conversations about how we could make it work. We were glad nothing much had been done to the place since, in the nineteenth century, someone had lowered the ceiling in the hall to construct a little overhead room for a servant, who had to climb to her bed up tiny, nearly vertical stairs.

  I keep repeating the basic question that nobody can answer for sure—when was our building built? I put this question out among my friends and people I thought would likely know. My two best-informed neighbors have no answers for sure, and “Vieille maison. Lacépède lived here in 1801,” is all I can learn from either the Guide Practique or Hillairet’s Dictionnaire.

  “Part of the seventeenth-century convent,” said Mme. D., on the third floor, our upstairs neighbor, to whose family our building has belonged since an ancestor bought it right after the Revolution. Her father agreed with this date. James Ivory, the director, who lives a block away and is very knowledgeable about Parisian architecture because of films he has made here, believes it to be “middle 1700s,” on the basis of his building at the corner of Rue Jacob, part of which is eighteenth century, part—the part where an American designer, Vicky Tiel, has her workroom—seventeenth century or even earlier. She has been forbidden by the Ville de Paris from altering her space consecrated to alterations.

  “Our building is 1629,” sniffed my neighbor Drusilla. She’s at number six, next to us, and in fact attached to us via a little building in the courtyard. Finally, a sort of consensus holds that some of our building was built in the seventeenth century, originally part of the convent built by Queen Margot and then Anne of Austria for the Petits-Augustinians, then added to in the eighteenth century, and a story added—the building is four stories high now. Many of the seventeenth-century buildings got an extra story later, either in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, when people built onto the roofs.

  Other neighbors come forth with other historical details. Madame de M., across the street, with her adorable dog, says that the windows of her apartment were blocked up at the kitchen level by the seventeenth-century Marquis de Persan, who planned to rent it out but was suddenly afraid his tenants would toss their déchets and ordures into his courtyard. Garbage, that is. Accounts of the filth of early Paris are pretty harrowing, and sewage flowed in the street.

  When confronted with the name of the Marquis de Persan, I suddenly realized that is almost the name of one of the characters in my novels about Paris, Antoine de Persand, perhaps subliminally suggested, though I don’t know where I could have come across it—perhaps in the invaluable Hillairet.

  THE MYSTERIES OF FRENCH HISTORY

  At number 3 bis, Lacordaire, Montelembert and Coux, who founded there the first École Libre in 1831 (inscription); at number 4, Pradier; at number 5, Gérard de Nerval; at number 13, Oscar Wilde, who died there in 1900; at number 10, Corot, Merimee and J.-J. Ampère; finally, at number 8, Fantin-Latour had his atelier in 1868.

  Hillairet, CONNAISSANCE DU VIEUX PARIS

  A person raised and educated in America may have to start from scratch when it comes to French history, if I am any example. Who was Lacordaire? Who was Coux? The above passage describes a little section of the Rue des Beaux-Arts. Like Rue de l’Abbaye, Rue des Beaux-Arts leads between Rue Bonaparte and Rue de Seine, and had its share of celebrated and obscure inhabitants. Just walking on any street of St.-Germain with Hillairet’s guide in hand makes me conscious of my almost complete ignorance of the events of French history, things that were unfolding, evidently, at the same time as things in England and, eventually, America, that form the focus of our anglo-oriented studies.

  Until now, when I thought of the nineteenth century, I would think of Queen Victoria, but never of Louis-Philippe or Napoleon III. We do recognize a furniture style called Directoire, but the English term “Regency” is more familiar. I could never have enumerated the French kings before Louis XIII (then it gets simple up through Napoleon), but, like many who went to elementary school in America, I can do all the English kings beginning with William and even a few of the Saxons, plus Boadicea.

  Walk over to the Rue de Seine via the Rue Visconti, and stop before, say, number twenty-four, which belonged, in 1599:

  to the poet Nicolas Vauquelin…. He became the teacher of César de Vendôme, then of the Dauphin in 1609; he left the court after the death of Henri IV, maybe disgraced by the boldness of his language. He then lived here a joyous epicurean, with a lady harp player, Jeanne Dupuy, picked up in the street.

  At the same number lived in 1658, the historian Nicolas Fontaine, who shared the work and the hardships of the recluses of Port-Royal, and was, at the Bastille from 1664 to 1669, the companion in captivity of Lemaistre de Sacy. In 1692 Racine lived here, for seven years until he died…in 1699.

  The indefatigable Hillairet knew his French history, but which Californian knows who Vauquelin was, or Lemaistre de Sacy, or why the latter was in the Bastille? Thus is the neighborhood saturated with more history than I can recount, each building a place where hundreds of people have lived. It would take a lifetime to understand the history of every building of this quarter, and even then, what would we know of all that really happened, was felt, was regretted and celebrated? How can one recapture a sense of the life unfolding here?

  Perhaps I’m extra fascinated by history because I myself come from a place with not much history at all, or not much by comparison, that I know of. The sole resonances of the past in Moline were the graves of Confederate soldiers who had been imprisoned in the Rock Island Arsenal and died there of something like yellow fever or smallpox. And then, a grandson of Charles Dickens, so it said on his tombstone, had strayed into our town—we never heard why—and was buried in the cemetery where we used to ride our bikes. Also, Mr. John Deere had set up his plow factory in Moline, but that was it for history.

  Paris has been here for two thousand years. In some ways it is always new; in others it has a patina and a collective sensibility that probably took two thousand years to develop, though it is hard to pinpoint all the ways this is manifested. One way is its self-regard. Knowing itself to be a precious example of civilization, it is constantly taking care of itself, polishing, repairing, gilding, refacing. Buildings are obliged to have their faces washed every ten years. Buildings of stone must be sandblasted; buildings like ours, stuccoed over the stones, must be repainted, and very expensive it was, too, more than ten thousand euros just for John’s and my share. The scaffolding eclipses the windows for weeks, and a scaffold is a signal to burglars that it is your turn for their attentions via the convenient means of entering you have provided.

  The burglar who came to our building did reconnaissance first, disguised as a representative of the painting company. I thought it was odd that people doing the facade would want to look in our back bathrooms and kitchen, but I didn’t tumble to his real game until another person in the building got suspicious, and called the police. Our burglar was gone in seconds, but weeks later, some false painters turned up, went into the apartment one floor above us, and began to help themselves. The building had to change all its locks, a project of immense expense and nuisance for everyone.

  There are not so many of us in 8 Rue Bonaparte. This is a small building, with us on the first floor; the colonel and his wife on the second, and their two daughters each with her apartment and family on the second and third; a small pied-à-terre on the third floor, also owned by that family; and the art galleries on the street level. These are Mssrs. Marcel and David Fleiss, father and son, dealers in twentieth-century art, that is, early modernist and contemporary art; M. Felix Marcillac, who sells important art deco furnit
ure; and Monsieur Rossignol, the bookseller. There is also a room for Errida, the gardienne (it is now considered non-p.c. to say “concierge”), who I think has to go into the entry of the cellar to shower. I have never wanted to know too much about this arrangement, but when I went down there with our late cat Walter who loved to prowl there, looking for cobwebs, I would sometimes hear a shower running. Until recently, the sanitary arrangements in many Parisian buildings involved a shared toilet on the landing, and God knows where the bath was; so I suppose Errida’s situation is not entirely unusual. She is from Mexico, which is not common in Paris, and though, being Californian, I should speak a sort of Spanish, we speak to each other in our bad French.

  It was the ancestor of the present family who bought our building after the Revolution, when all of Paris was for sale, and well-off middle-class people were able to buy real estate that had until then been the property of aristocrats and friends of the king—people who were beheaded. As I have mentioned, we are the sole outsiders in our building—otherwise all the apartments are lived in by three generations of the one family—grandparents, parents, and children, and there are even two great-grandchildren who are often brought to visit. Presumably some members of these three generations were themselves brought up in the building, just as their children are being brought up here now; there’s also a country house where they all go on the (numerous) French vacations. I often think how nice this arrangement is, not unlike the communes idealistic Americans tried to form in the sixties (no doubt fraught with the same potential for squabbles).

  There are so many advantages to this way of life. When one of the sisters happens to be out, the other can take in her packages or groceries; all the cousins grow up knowing each other, with babysitting always on hand; models of extended family life—so much nicer than the bleak isolation of an American suburb with the mothers going crazy, and rivers of gin. Of course, the French family may all detest each other, but they don’t seem to, and if they do, they would never show it, with their good manners and unfailing charm.

  We are not here in the summers, when, with the windows open, we could glean a better take on all the family relationships. In our last apartment, on Rue St.-Simon, it was a festival of Portuguese in the summers; all the gardiennes talking and gossiping and launching horrendous, audible quarrels.

  To find the exact date of our building remains an unfulfilled quest.

  DETAILS

  Dorothy and I went on a walk. We only walked a few blocks but only in a few blocks we read all the historical names, like Coty and Cartier and I knew we were seeing something educational at last and our whole trip as not a failure.

  Anita Loos, GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (quoted in Steven Barclay’s A PLACE IN THE WORLD CALLED PARIS)

  I am daunted by the elusive details of history, some of its figures to be discovered but none to be really heard or felt. What was the sound of their voices, what were the cooking smells in the corridor? My friend Mireille, who is a professor at the Sorbonne and an expert on the French language of the sixteenth century, says that it is known, at least, that Henri IV spoke French with a heavy Béarnais accent (though to me that only conjures tarragon and butter). She also tells me that even so late as the eighteenth century, even until the time of Voltaire, most French people didn’t speak “proper” French, but some dialect like Provençal, or Catalan. The accents of people from the south of France still sound very Italian to me, with the same way of pronouncing r, the letter most dreaded by anglophones.

  The Italian Catherine de Médicis spoke French but with a strong Italian accent, which was always disliked and criticized; and the strongest dislike was felt for some of her Italian courtiers—though not as strong as that felt for the Italian friends of Marie de Médicis, the greedy couple Concini. He was assassinated and she was burned as a witch. All these historical characters never to be heard, nor much known about their religion, their philosophies, or love lives! I have mentioned the odd reticence in modern reference books about religion. The early La Rochefoucaulds were Huguenots. I don’t know about the many modern La Rochefoucaulds, including a woman who had an antique shop on the Rue de l’Université near here, and quite a few others—almost all countesses, as I confirm in my Bottin Mondain, a sort of social register of France. This is a fat book I once had the luck to find—someone had put it out on the street, outdated to be sure, but since things change slowly here, still very serviceable as a source of endless fascination and information. For instance, here is a sample passage chosen at random, with the names slightly altered by me in case the real people would mind: “Dubilliard (Guillaume) Colonel (ER) et Mme née Monique Pozac—10 rue Dupine 44000 Mantes Tel 04 xxx, enfants Justine (du premier marriage du colonel avec Madame Nicole O’Haggerty), Brigitte (Mme Albert Godet), Flore-Annie (Mme Romulus Dupee), Roland, Henri.”

  What dramas are implied by the mention of the first marriage of the colonel and Mademoiselle O’Haggerty? The Bottin keeps nothing back. It also gives the floor plans of the various theaters and opera houses helpful for ordering tickets, and phone numbers of auctioneers. It is snobbish but democratic, so foreigners are admitted, as in the case of one Mme. Hervé Arzad, née Susan-Jane Moscovitz from Bronx, New York.

  But the point is, even in the Bottin there seem to be no subtle clues (except, perhaps, having a Swiss medal), no reference to parish or temple, that would hint at their religious preferences, not important in the case of the modern Dubilliards, but for figuring out the social affinities of the salonistes or where someone stood in the Fronde, important. What was the religion of the author of the Maxims?

  DETAILS:

  Instead of lampposts on Rue Bonaparte and adjacent streets, the city of Paris has hung lanterns of the kind they would have had in the eighteenth century, when the streets first began to be lighted. It is easy to forget how dark earlier nights must have been—gas lighting was only introduced on the public streets in 1829. Before that, various schemes had been tried—ordinances requiring everyone to put a candle in his window; mobile torch-carriers for hire who would see you home for a few coins. Rue Dauphine had oil lanterns for a time.

  Running water, too, was a relatively modern invention. William Cole, in his Rue Bonaparte lodgings, had only a basin for handwashing. He doesn’t mention other sanitary arrangements. Nor does Hillairet, beyond saying that Paris “was always a city crotté,” meaning what one still notices on the sidewalks, now attributable to dogs, whose owners are enjoined to clean up after their pets, and some actually do.

  The harmony of the facades is one of the things that gives Paris its exceptional beauty; the other is the fact that the buildings have been kept from going too high—six or seven stories is about the limit. The American architect John Field has a convincing theory about the livability of cities: that a height limit of around six stories (and a more dense habitation per square mile) should be the model for urban schemes in America—cities ought to fill in among existing buildings, not with high-rise but with buildings of this height, which allow for light, and visible sky, and a pedestrian’s comfortable point of view. One proof that his theory produces an ideal urban environment is that Paris, without resorting to high-rises, has one of the highest population densities of cities anywhere, and apparently there is something innately compatible with human psyche about buildings of this height.

  It is, anyhow, the formula the French are comfortable with and are keeping to inside Paris, though they have built some strange-looking high-rises outside the city. The present mayor of Paris has sounded a warning that high-rises inside the Périphérique (the ring road around the core city) were being studied, but he can probably expect a lot of public opposition, such as that which appeared with the Tour Montparnasse (in part blamed on an American developer), which most people felt spoiled the skyline, an eyesore that people avoid. (The mayor privately told a New York Times reporter he would like to tear it down.) Part of the Stalinist-looking medical school on the Rue des Sts.-Pères, built in 1937, so out of place amon
g the beautiful seventeenth-century buildings, was torn down; the height was reduced by two stories after a public outcry, but is still felt to, in the words of one guidebook, “dishonor” the quarter and the sky.

  Meantime, the suburbs outside the ring road bristle with fanciful tall buildings, like the giant Grande Arche de La Défense, thirty-six stories high, built in the shape of an arch, on the axis of the Arc de Triomphe. To cross the Périphérique is to enter a brave new world of (usually ugly) mirrored skyscrapers and round or trapezoidal architectural fantasies.

  THE MATERIAL WORLD

  Inanimate objects, have you a soul That’s attached to our soul, with the strength to love?

  Lamartine, HARMONIES

  In Rue Bonaparte and the adjoining streets are a concentration of art and antiques galleries and stores mostly so grand I have been afraid to go into them, but once or twice a year, the dealers have a sort of fair, and put their most alluring objects in their windows. The assortment boggles the mind—giant porphyry urns, bits of antique tombs, Boulle cabinets, chandeliers, antlers, paintings from various epochs.

  Madame Boccador, one of the antiques dealers along the Quai Voltaire to the west of Bonaparte, has a beautiful tapestry of Diane de Poitiers, or rather, Poitiers as the goddess Diana, with Acteon, who has just been turned into a stag for having looked upon the naked beauty in her bath. His dog sits ominously at his side—we know from the myth that his dog will soon kill him.

  Madame Boccador, like everyone in St.-Germain, it seems, writes books. One day she gave me a volume of her stories; but her other works are about art. I learned two things from Madame Boccador, just as I always learn something when I walk around the neighborhood, whether I mean to or not: It had always escaped me that some of the statues of robed religious figures holding babies, ubiquitous in France and Italy, are not the Madonna but Christ himself. Their long hair and drapery had confused me; these are “Majesties,” adult Christs holding baby Jesuses.